Build performance and size

By default this theme includes all of your documentation links in a collapsible sidebar. However, this may slow down your documentation builds considerably if you have a lot of documentation pages. This is most common with documentation for projects with a large API, which use the .. autosummary:: directive to generate API documentation.

To improve the performance of your builds in these cases, first try modifying the navigation depth in the sidebar (see Navigation depth and collapsing sidebars). If that doesn’t work, try the fix in the section below.

Selectively remove pages from your sidebar

You can prevent pages from showing up in the navigation bar using a Sphinx extension called sphinx-remove-toctrees. This is useful if your documentation generates lots of “stub pages” in a folder, which is common with API documentation.

This lets you add a configuration like so:

remove_from_toctrees = ["folder_one/generated/*"]

and any pages that are inside of folder_one/generated/ will not show up in the sidebar.

Check out the sphinx-remove-toctrees documentation for information about how to install and use this extension.